Professor Donna Wilcock discusses a new biological technique for diagnosing Alzheimer's disease using PET neuroimaging.

There are some imaging mechanisms that are coming up that use injectable compounds that will readily cross into the brain and bind to amyloid plaques. We can see this on (typically) PET scanning, which will give you an image of the brain. Basically, different colors will tell you how much amyloid is in that part of the brain. These are looking really promising and it’s still in very late stage clinical trials – they call it the PiB compound. This is very late stage clinical trials but should be coming into the clinic, I believe, reasonably soon. It is safe. The biggest question is reproducibility – if you see the same patient over many different times, do you see the same levels of amyloid? I think that is going to have to be used in conjunction with the battery of memory tests. Really only, a true, true diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease is only made at autopsy when we see the amyloid plaques, the tangles, and the neurodegeneration, the neuron loss.

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